Wild Justice

by Loren D. Estleman

  The still was a model of its type. It was self-contained for indoor operation, with a fire burning in the base of a boiler from a steam engine and stovepipe to draw the smoke out through the back wall. Fifteen yards of coiled copper pipe dripped crystal-clear liquid into a bucket at the rate of a drop a minute; a man could mesmerize himself watching it quiver on the nozzle and guessing the point at which it would let go and plop into the bucket. Notwithstanding the pace, some three inches of two hundred-proof skullbuster had accumulated in the bottom in the time I was there; enough to turn a meeting of the St. Sebastian Committee to Prevent Social Injustice into a fandango.

  The proprietor demonstrated a surprising sense of parlor etiquette, introducing each of the men who sat in the chairs: “Oskar Newmunster, Gilmer Gurst, John Engles. You got a name besides the one you come in with?”

  They stared up at me, cradling their jars as if I might snatch them away. Their faces had been left out in the rain to swell and turn gray, then in the sun to crack and curl, then in the snow to bite their noses and cheeks with frost, in patches the color of white lead. They ran to a common age. A citified easterner would reckon it at fifty or better, but I’d spent enough time in open country to subtract as much as twenty years from that; they’d look no older at eighty, if the work didn’t take them first. They wore church coats in as good condition as they could be kept in that part of the world, except for Engles’, which needed brushing and had for some time; plainly, he was the one without a wife. I pegged Newmunster as the man who’d cast his vote in my favor; his pale blue eyes were friendly, and there was something about the cast of his features that suggested Norway and none of its neighbors. This was one of those inexplicable visceral assumptions that held up in Blackthorne’s quarters but not his court.

  The name I came up with was another.

  “Howard Rossleigh. I’m with the Montana Press Association.”

  Finlay grunted. “You’re a piece off your territory.”

  “I’m on special assignment for the Hearst Press, to travel the country and report on items overlooked by the competition.”

  Lies came to me like ticks to a dog; telling them was a talent I’d brought with me to law enforcement, and one less thing for Blackthorne to tutor me in. There were advantages to being raised by a Montana trapper who spun yarns through the winter in order to ravel them for whoever’d listen come spring.

  Newmunster showed a gold incisor. “You came to the right place, then. This is just about the overlookedest town east of anywhere and west of no place at all. Even the balloons don’t set down long enough to steal dust. Ask old Engels here.” He pointed the rim of his canning jar at the unbrushed man seated to his left, dour-looking and short-waisted, with a pair of legs stretched out in front of him that gave the impression he’d been split more than halfway up his length. He’d been staring down into his own jar, but now he perked up at the sound of his name, like an old bird dog. His friend assaulted him with a singsong jabber, waving his vessel my way.

  Engels’ demeanor changed. Seeing himself the object of a stranger’s attention, he brightened three shades and answered in the same tongue, slopping liquid from his jar as he outlined a great circle with his hands, accompanying the gesture with a hoarse gust of air that approximated the whoosh a silken bag makes when the pilot manipulates it to expel heated air for the descent.

  None of this was new to me; I’d seen and heard lighter-than-air craft land. But I put on a face as excited as the potato farmer’s, took out my memorandum book and pencil, and made some doodles on a blank page. I stopped him once to get the spelling of his name, which when Newmunster translated the question made him puff out his chest.

  Gilmer Gurst, a man with sails for ears and hair curling colorless as seaweed over his collar, was less interested, as was Finlay, clearing their throats impatiently at intervals. They’d heard the story more than once; but I prevented interruption by exchanging a quarter for a jar of Purgatory. The contents were so transparent they didn’t distort the shape of my hand when I peered through the glass, but they left a flaming trail of coal oil down my throat and reverberated like a bass drum when they hit the floor of my stomach. I sipped slowly after that, in order not to miss a syllable of what Engels had to report:

  ME: Was anyone aboard besides the man who operated the balloon?

  ENGELS (through Newmunster): Ja, two.

  ME: What did they look like?

  ENGELS: One was taller than the other.

  ME: But what did they look like? Dark, fair, clean-shaven, bearded? (Rossleigh’s horsecollar whiskers were memorable.)

  The farmer shrugged, got irritated when I pressed him.

  ENGELS: It was dark and they were too far away.

  ME: Tell me more about the balloon. How big was it? (Seen one, seen them all; but I was losing him with too many questions about what were to him mundane details. I sped up my scribbling while he described the damn thing all over again using his hands. It got a little bigger with each repetition.)

  ME: Did anyone get off?

  ENGELS: Ja, but they were already across the patch when I got there.

  ME: They? You mean both men got out together?

  Here Engles looked at Newmunster and said something that wasn’t directed to me.

  “What?” I asked his friend.

  Gold glinted. “He asked me if ‘they’ means the same thing in Montana as it does in Minnesota.”

  It took me a moment to work that out: There were three in the balloon, including the pilot.

  The farmer was sure the passengers hadn’t left with the craft.

  I asked him where I could find his potato patch. Again an aside to Newmunster.

  “He’s afraid you’ll trample his plants. That contraption already—”

  “Tell him I’ll pay for any damage.”

  Engels nodded when this was translated. Then his face brightened again and he lifted his jar. I didn’t need an interpreter for that. I paid Finlay for another round. By the time I took my leave they were ready to elect me mayor.

  * * *

  Beatrice Blackthorne looked up from her knitting. “Two men? Are you sure?”

  “One taller than the other. Rossleigh’s six feet.”

  “Are you not leaping to a conclusion?”

  “There’s still no sign of The Javelin. Short of hopping a balloon, I can’t think of another way he’d have gotten here ahead of us. What are the odds of one landing in this burg the same day? And what happened to those passengers? You saw how much interest we attracted. To stay out of sight in a town this size, unaccustomed as it is to traffic from outside, they must be up to something.”

  Her nose wrinkled. “Have you been drinking on the Sabbath?”

  So much for grain alcohol having no odor on the breath. “If Finlay had been serving lemonade, I’d still be there waiting for light to break.”

  “My just desserts, I suppose, for inquiring into your methods. I swore never to do so, and my marriage was happy in consequence. What can you hope to learn by visiting the potato patch?”

  “Tracks,” I said, “leading in the general direction of the livery where someone took a potshot at me.”

  “You will proceed with caution, of course. His aim may improve next time.”

  “It would have to go some to do that. If that bullet was meant for my heart, we wouldn’t be talking.” I tugged loose my necktie. “How did things go with Young Pulitzer?”

  “Young—? Oh, you mean Mr. Ferris. It became obvious early on he wanted to bring his readers to tears. I accommodated him; at some length, of course. I assumed you needed the time without interruption. I must say, bringing up old memories—” Her gaze dropped to her basket and her fingers resumed working. “Well, one cannot live in the past, can one?”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing this whole trip.”

  * * *

  I changed from my town clothes to dungarees, my duck coat, and stout boots, and followed a pair of wagon ruts from town to a p
lot with a narrow two-story unpainted house and a barn three times its size with what looked like a fresh coat of whitewash tinted rusty red from the iron oxide the farmer mixed in to seal the source of his livelihood. The place was rich with the odor of freshly turned earth and manure, and the rich brown soil preserved footprints like wet clay. Engels’ waffle-patterned soles and the half-circle of his plow team’s shoes were easy to separate from a set of side-by-side tracks leading toward town from a square indentation some four feet in diameter—the print of the gondola—near the center of the field. A pair of square-toed town shoes were spaced far enough apart to suggest the long stride of someone like Rossleigh, but there were places where the gait appeared to have shortened, probably to allow the hiker’s smaller companion to catch up.

  The second set belonged to a pair of significantly smaller feet, which bore closer study. These shoes were pointed, with circular punctures left by the heels. They were narrower than those worn by men who depended on such heels to grip their stirrups when they rode; men like me. And that fact turned every theory I’d brought to that piece of ground square on its head.

  III

  THE COURT ADJOURNS

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Taters.”

  “What?”

  In the spring of ’77 it seemed I was always asking Bear Anderson to repeat himself. At seven feet and two hundred fifty pounds, he was accustomed to working out every muscle except the ones that controlled his power of speech. What passed for oral communication was a deep, grinding murmur that sounded more like a grizzly chasing tenderfeet in its dreams.

  “I bet I dug enough taters out of this patch to cover the mountain top to bottom ten times. Funny thing, though.”

  I waited. You did a lot of waiting when you were in the mountain man’s company, unless you belonged to the Salish Indian tribe. The mere appearance of a brave within lunging distance turned him into a whirling frenzy; whether his bowie or his fist struck first depended on what side of him his despised enemy was standing; the power of the blow itself determined whether the Indian was still breathing when his scalp took leave of his skull.

  I lost patience and prompted, “Funny thing?”

  “I’m blowed if I can remember ever eating a single one of them spuds.”

  We were standing at the time in an acre of Bitterroot Range country grown over with vines that no longer bore fruit, on the edge of which still stood the gaunt blackened timbers of the cabin he’d grown up in, fifteen years after he’d set fire to it with his parents’ massacred corpses inside. His father, a Norwegian (like most of the population of the Minnesota settlement the Blackthorne train had stopped in), had felled trees for his pay and scrabbled in the dirt to feed his family when the money ran short. Whether the renegade Salish had resented the cutting or the plowing had long since ceased to draw the curiosity of the slain couple’s neighbors; they were more interested in the body count their son continued to exact from the tribe.

  His legend—for it was that—didn’t shake me. Of all the men who rode for Blackthorne, I was the only one who’d grown up in the territory. I couldn’t remember a spring that didn’t come with a new horror story that had played out during the months of short days and long nights; husbands and wives alike lost their footing on reality when they were snowed in for weeks on end, raced each other for the axe or cleaver, and finished as often as not in a dead heat. Tales of cannibalism weren’t just inventions to put the children to bed on time. The community looked forward to details of the occasional incest as a respite from blood and gore.

  What rocked me to my heels was that Bear’s long one-man war against an entire people, much of it involving hand-to-hand combat with knives and tomahawks (and a strangling that had consumed most of an hour and three hundred yards down a mountainside) wasn’t the first thing on his mind when we visited the scene of his parents’ murder. It was potatoes.

  A week or so later, the big man had dangled from the scaffold in Helena—on the second try, after his weight snapped the first rope. I was the one who put him there (after persuasion that had nearly left me behind with the Andersons’ potatoes) by the Judge’s orders in response to a demand from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in pursuit of a peace treaty with Chief Two Sisters, hereditary leader of the Salish Nation, inaccurately referred to by the eastern press as the Flatheads.

  “Spit it out, Deputy,” Blackthorne said. “I can’t have an officer of this court moping about like a wallflower at a cotillion.”

  “Give me time, Your Honor. I knew Anderson since he wasn’t any bigger than a heifer. We camped out together when my father was on his trapline and his was away jacking timber. He taught me how to use a bowie without slicing up my hand.” If he hadn’t, the last part of our story would have had a different ending.

  “I’m aware of your shared history. Why did you think I selected you to bring him in? Anyone else who got close enough wound up decorating the man’s belt with his topknot. You didn’t complain when I gave you the assignment.”

  “The plan then was to try him, in order to avoid an Indian war. I didn’t know it would play out the way it did.”

  “Neither did that butcher I made the mistake of promoting from turnkey to hangman. He thought he found a bargain in South American hemp. Dollarhyde, his successor, used the East Indian variety exclusively; consequently he was never obliged to hang a man more than once. You must have known you were condemning your old friend to execution. The Flatheads would have settled for nothing less.”

  “I was drunk on the spirit of the chase.”

  “An appropriate metaphor. A morning after is part of the transaction. You’ll get over it. Hangovers don’t last.”

  The Judge was wrong there. I never ate another potato, and to this day I can’t spend any time in a patch without thinking I should have stepped aside for someone else.

  * * *

  An ostrich-shaped silhouette stood on the edge of John Engles’ patch, with the town at its back. That bulge halfway between its head and its long thin bowed legs could belong only to the local guardian of the law. Karl Lundergaard stood in the shade of a straw hat with a flop brim, carrying a single-barreled shotgun in the crook of one arm, broken at the breech, the way a bird hunter does to avoid shooting his pointer dog before it can flush out supper. He might have been just out hunting, at that; in that long-tamed country, a peace officer carrying a weapon out in the open was getting to be as rare as a balloon sighting.

  I made a beckoning gesture. He hesitated, then started my way, mincing between the green sprouts on corns and bunions. The man was tailor-made for collaring boys chucking rocks through store windows. As a manhunter he’d be worse than no law at all.

  “I heard you talked to Engels,” he said when he reached me. His breath chugged. He’d hiked all of a hundred yards from his parlor.

  “Nothing gets past you, I guess.”

  I waited for him to take the bait and look down, but whatever he was using for eyes back in those swags of liverish flesh remained level with mine. Finally I pointed at the turned earth at my feet. He stared at my finger for a moment, the way a dog does when you try to direct its attention to a bone. Then his head tilted forward, wallowing in his chins.

  “Town shoes, both pairs,” I said. “It isn’t every day you see tracks like that in a potato patch. The arches are too high for walking any distance.”

  “It is Sunday. Folks get out their best for church, and cut cross lots to shorten the hike.”

  “These start in the middle of the field, where the balloon set down.”

  He nodded. Somehow I had the impression he’d already come to the same conclusion. Arguing was a habit he’d gotten into to avoid serving the responsibilities of his office.

  “That would explain it. A ride in the sky, I’d put on spats for a thing like that.”

  “An eagle-eye like you would know if there were any new faces around, all decked out for civilization.”

  “Maybe so. Then again maybe not, if they didn’t sp
end much time here.”

  He’d got his breathing under control, but that didn’t entirely account for the satisfaction that had crept into his tone. He was looking at me now; so far as I could tell.

  I let out air. “Play your hand, Lundergaard. I’ve got a bellyful of the Devil’s tea and no head for guessing.”

  “Merle Thompson owns the livery. After you and I talked I dropped by his house, neighborlike, to tell him somebody busted into the stable. I went with him to check the place out. I don’t guess you noticed two horses was missing.”

  “I was too busy ducking lead to search the place for a list of the inventory.”

  “I figured as much. Anyway they were two of the best animals in his care, owned by a couple of our most respected citizens, so he’s all hot to track ’em down. I ain’t Dan’l Boone, so I thought of you straight off.”

  “No one was ever Daniel Boone, including Daniel Boone. I can’t go haring off after horse thieves and leave Mrs. Blackthorne unprotected. You’ll have to handle it yourself, Marshal.”

  “This ain’t Tombstone or Dodge City. We don’t get but one felony in six months. Two in one day—if what happened to you wasn’t some yonker’s prank—in the same place raises the question that we’re both of us interested in the same folks. Two sets of tracks in John Engles’ field settles the thing for me.”

  “For me, too. But my job’s to get the widow and what’s left of her husband to Delaware before he starts to turn. I’ve been shot at before, so I don’t place as much value on my hide as your respected citizens do on their horseflesh.”